Robotic Spider Web Crawlers in Space!

Space.com has an article about a space mission to test small space
spider robots that can crawl along mesh webbing. A mother ship at
the center will deploy three small satellites which will stretch out a
triangular 20 by 40 meter mesh net. The mother ship's cameras will
confirm that the net is unfurled and not tangled. Next, two tiny
palm-sized spider robots named RobySpace Junior 1 and 2 will leave the
mother ship at the center and attempt to crawl along the mesh net out to
one of the satellites.
These Furoshiki (Japanese word for wrapping cloth) satellites and robots
will be tested during a joint mission January 18th, 2006 with the
Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency and the
Vienna University of Technology. The experiment will be launched on a
rocket that will have a sub-orbital trajectory so the test will only
have about ten minutes of microgravity to run before it descends and
vaporizes the spider robots in our Earth's atmosphere. Perhaps in the
future we may have space spider robots crawling around an outerspace web
and building all sorts of
interplanetary structures!